


The Attic

by MsArachnid



Series: Junktober Drabbles and Fic [4]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: (mentioned) - Freeform, Gen, Human Experimentation, Minor Body Horror, Moira and Junkrat are related, Violence, bug eating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 12:05:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16555436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsArachnid/pseuds/MsArachnid
Summary: The finale of the Junktober drabbles!Teenager Mako is sent to spend a weekend with Moira, but there's something in her attic...





	The Attic

**Author's Note:**

> Moira is kind of the bad guy in this, I'm sorry. She wasn't supposed to be originally, just a weird science lady taking care of a hybrid kid in her attic, but then...it didn't happen like that. Not a lot happened like it was supposed to.
> 
> Its based off The Prank by Gregory Maguire

_The steps creaked with each step, threatening to collapse under his weight, but they held. They were a moldy gray color, and textured as if they were carpeted. The might have been, fifty years ago._

_After what felt like forever, he reached the attic door. It was made of thick wood, with a heavy lock and chain on the outside, as if it were keeping something in._

_He broke down the door._

 

The house looked abandoned. Mako didn’t want to get out of the car, but his social worker was physically, literally prodding him with her pencil. 

This or juvie, he reminded himself.

The stone steps were cracked, the railing broken off and leaning against the house. Dead bushes were on either side of the screen door, who’s screen was cracked and torn, and which hung crookedly on the hinges. The garage doors were covered by plywood.

He only had to stay here a weekend. Just about 48 hours, or until his step-mom got out. He could do that.

He knocked on the screen door, which rattled dangerously. If it fell off, it wasn’t his fault. Immediately, the door opened. A tall woman (not nearly as tall as Mako, but close) opened the door. “You’re late,” she said.

Mako shrugged.

“Well,” she said, “I’m Moira, a friend of your dad. I’m not thrilled about this, either, but we’re both getting something out of this. Here are the rules: _don’t_ go in the garage. Don’t go in the attic. This isn’t your house, don’t treat it like it is. Don’t touch anything unless I tell you. Let me show you your room.”

Mako gave a half-shrug and followed Moira down the hall. The house was cluttered with all sorts of stuff. Faded tapestries hung everywhere on the walls. Newspapers, magazines, and books were stacked all over the floor, leaving only a thin path to walk in. Mako had to turn slightly so his shoulders would fit down the cramped hall.

Moira stopped at a closed door next to the bathroom. She opened it and left, saying she’d let him ‘settle in’. He was grateful for that, that she wouldn’t be breathing down his neck all weekend, waiting for him to snap again.

The air inside the room was stale. Mako tried opening the window, but it was nailed shut. He’d deal with it later. The walls were an awful puke green color, which paired nicely with the piss yellow bedspread. Everything in the room looked rickety, decades old, and covered with dust. He wondered if the sheets had been washed in the last decade. It didn’t look like it. He dumped his bag on the bed and left to check out the bathroom.

It was also very outdated. It smelled like a bathroom instead of state, and the window wasn’t nailed shut. Everything was rusty and one look at the shower told Mako any washing up he did would be a tits and pits bath in front of the sink.

Moira called him to the kitchen, so he went to find it. It wasn’t hard; it was just down the hallway. Moira stood at the table with a heaping plate of beef. Mako wasn’t the biggest fan, but when given the choice between eating something he disliked and voluntarily going hungry, he’d rather eat. Still, he wondered if there were options. He stared at the plate.

“You can eat it or not,” Moira said, “just don’t bother me. You can read whatever books are out.” 

She left. Mako sat down. He ate his meal.

Afterwards, he did some snooping in the kitchen. He found a lot of meat, coffee, bread, and not much else. He took a box of crackers well past their expiration date with him, along with some manga from the stacks of books piled high all over the house.

In one drawer he found a fat stack of cash. It was too obviously placed to not be there one purpose, and Mako wondered what Moira would get out of him running away. He wondered what she got out of him staying, too.

He left it in the drawer for later, maybe.

He dumped the crackers and books in his room. There was still some daylight left so he went outside to have a look around. It wasn’t interesting. A chain-link fence surrounded the house and yard, which contained more dead bushes, overgrown grass, and what would be a treehouse, were it in a tree.

Odd. Moira didn’t have kids.

Maybe it came with the house - it certainly looked old enough. Mako didn’t chance investigating. There was no way any part of it would hold him.

The sun started to set so he went inside. There wasn’t anything outside that was interesting enough to look at in the dark. Back in the room, he worked on getting the nails out of the window. He couldn’t get them out without a hammer. What was the point of the nails, anyway? They looked like they’d been there a long time, so they weren’t a recent addition to keep him in.

With a grunt, he pulled the top of the window pane off. The old wood gave out easily. There. Now at least he could get some fresh air.

He stripped down to his boxers and settled into bed, planning to read for a while. The lamp blew out as soon as he turned it on, so maybe reading would have to wait. He tried to sleep.

Mako awoke to screaming. Or maybe it was wailing? Probably some fox outside looking to get lucky. The scratching was definitely coming from inside the house, though. It didn’t surprise him that Moira had rats.

After a few minutes of laying in bed and hearing nothing except the rats in the walls, Mako wondered if he heard anything at all. Maybe he woke up because he needed the bathroom.

He met Moira in the hall. She was heading the wrong direction to be coming from the bathroom. She had something in her hand, which she slipped behind her back once she saw that he noticed it. “Bathroom,” she mumbled and she pushed past him.

The bathroom didn’t need a key.

The attic probably did, though. But checking now would make her suspicious. He should wait until the morning, when she locked herself in the garage again.

He used the bathroom, then went back to his room and ate crackers until the sun came up. They were stale and looked like they had some sort of seed on them, until a dead moth fell out of the package.

Oh. Gross.

He finished the crackers anyway, eggs and all. He’d eaten worse and wasn’t about to wuss out _now_. He tried to sleep more but it wouldn’t come, so he read until Moira called him for breakfast.

Breakfast was toast. Lots of toast. No butter, no jam, just half a loaf of slightly stale bread. Moira must have noticed the less than thrilled look on his face, because she went to the drawer with the cash and took out a few bills.

“If this isn’t to your liking, you can always go down to the corner store and get something else.”

No, he couldn’t. If he left her property, the state police would drag his ass to juvie faster than you could say “she told me to”. He just stared at her.

“No? Then finish up. We have chores to do.” She took two slices and left the rest for him. She didn’t let him leave until he finished, and he hated every bland, mushy bite. Once finished, she offered him a glass of foggy water. He drank it. 

The chores she had him do dealt with tidying up outside. He had to dig up dead bushes and drag them to the corner of the yard to be burned, cut the grass with an old push mower, take the screen door off its hinges. Moira supervised the whole time from under her wide-brimmed sun hat. She didn’t let him out of her sight all day. She even followed him inside for bathroom breaks.

By the time the sun went down Mako was exhausted. After dinner, he washed up and went to bed.

He completely forgot about the key until he woke up to rustling. It must be something in the bushes, he thought, but the bushes were too far away to hear rustling this faint.

The scratching in the walls had started, too.

He crept out, as quietly as he could. The floor creaked, but he heard no movement. Moira’s door was shut and the lights were off.

The door to the garage didn’t need a lock. The door to the attic steps did, however.

He paused. Should he go up? Should he try to take the key without waking Moira, or wake her up to ask what she was hiding? Or should he ignore it completely, finish out his stay and go home to continue his life?

He broke the door handle and went up the stairs.

The steps creaked with each step, threatening to collapse under his weight, but they held. They were a moldy gray color, and textured as if they were carpeted. The might have been, fifty years ago.

After what felt like forever, he reached the attic door. It was made of thick wood, with a heavy lock and chain on the outside, as if it were keeping something in.

He broke down the door.

Before he could open it enough to see inside, there was a shriek from behind him.

“What are you _doing_?” Moira looked _wild_ \- her normally pristine hair flew everywhere, her rumpled robe fluttering out behind her. She screamed and tackled Mako from behind. He tried to shrug her off but she *clung*, elbows and knees digging into him, fingers and nails clawing at his hair, eyes, mouth, whatever they could reach. “Don’t open that door,” she screamed in his ear, just as he did exactly that, “that’s my _son_!”

-

Mako’s life was not especially normal. His mother was dead, his father in prison, his step-mother in prison for just a few more days. Mako himself didn’t venture beyond petty crime - a few public vandalizations, trespassing, fighting. Those had all been brushed off with fines and warnings, so why was he now facing charges?

The press got a hold of his most recent fight. They tried to peg it as a hate crime, despite Mako also being gay. Being gay didn’t erase that the guy was an _asshole_.

Even though his circumstances could be better, Mako still tried living as normally as possible. He went to school sometimes, watched TV, liked to read, and liked animals.

Nothing could prepare him for what he saw. He wasn’t sure if he was _really_ seeing it, and would have thought he might still be sleeping were it not for Moira’s boney joints currently digging into his soft parts.

The attic looked like an attic. There was one small window at the far end, which was the only light source. It showed a small area in blue moonlight, the rest shrouded in darkness. There was a bed along a wall, a heavily chained shape lying atop the mattress. All around the bed was shredded fur, bones, paper, wood.

The shape moved. Moira froze, just for a second, before leaping off and pushing past Mako, rushing over to the bed. She cooed and comforted and it looked so _wrong_ , so out of character for her to do. The creature seemed to think so, too, because it shuffled as far from her as it could. It wasn’t far.

A cloud moved, allowing more lights into the room. Mako gaped. What huddled on the bed wasn’t a person. At least, not completely.

It had patchy blonde hair, with sharp facial features. It was thin everywhere, and long, so Mako could believe this was Moira’s son. But the thing on the bed wasn’t just a tall, thin human with a pointy nose and strange hair pattern.

The blanket slipped, allowing what should be a back leg to show. It didn’t end in a foot, though, but a claw. Every limb present (it was missing two, both on the right) ended in a claw-like paw. Mako even swore he saw a giant _rat tail_ peak out of the canvas.

It turned to look at Mako and let out a godawful shriek, showing lots of pointy yellow teeth.

Mako flinched slightly. “What the _fuck_ is that?”

“ _He_ ,” Moira said from the bed, “as I already told you, is my _son_. Jamison.”

“But why is it _here_?” Mako could be called a criminal, sure. Maybe he belonged in jail like everybody said. But _this_ \- locking up a _human experiment_ in an _attic_ \- was a whole different field. Mako couldn’t deal with _this_. He took a step backwards.

He missed the landing and fell backwards, down the stairs. The last thing he remembered was blue moonlight, sharp teeth, faded paint.

-

Mako opened his eyes. The light in the living room was on and he had a pillow under his head. Moira squatted nearby with a glass of clear liquid. She held it out to him.

He looked up the stairs, but could only see halfway up. She probably put the door back, then. The first door was still open - Mako was laying in the doorway, legs still on the steps.

He didn’t feel like moving them. His head _hurt_.

Moira was saying something. “- cash in the counter and run, I’ll make up something believable for the cops -”

“What? No,” Mako said, “You can’t make me go anywhere.”

She looked at him reproachfully as she put the drink on a table. “You wanted to leave earlier.”

Mako struggled to sit up. He bit down a wave of nausea. “That was before I knew you had a _kid_ in your attic. You can’t do that.”

“And you can’t just beat up whoever you want.”

“They deserved it. You do, too.”

Moira took a step back. “He was going to die, anyway.”

Mako stood, finally. He cornered Moira so she understood just _how_ big he was, how he _absolutely could_ just beat up whoever he wanted. “Tell me who he is.”

“He’s not my son, first of all.” Moira, for her part, did not look intimidated. “He’s my brother.”

“What.” He hadn’t looked older than Mako, from what he could see. Maybe even a few years younger.

“We were close as kids, in the rival sort of way. But he was immature and teased me so I fed him rat poison and, well.”

Mako couldn’t believe that a human eating rat poison would turn them _into_ a rat, but the thing upstairs clearly wasn’t a fake, so, maybe? But still, feeding anyone any type of poison simply because they annoyed you was _insane_.

“It was recalled soon after, and you could see why. He turned pretty fast. He stopped aging. Our parents finally noticed, but didn’t do anything. _I_ saved him, and I’ve been working to help him for _years_. Along with my other work.”

Sure.

This was honestly beyond fucked up and Mako needed a way out.

He ran up the steps, this time not caring about being quiet or careful. He threw the door off and worked on unchaining the rat-boy when Moira caught him. 

“What are you doing?!” She asked, frantic. She tried to stop him, jumping on him again.

“Leaving,” he said, shrugging her off. The creature just stared and chattered, but didn’t fight. Mako gave up on unlocking the chains and just yanked them off the wall. He wrapped the ends up in a pile on the bed. The creature - that’s right, his name was Jamison - noticed.

Mako heard a click behind him. “I hoped I’d never have to do this,” said Moira, “especially not to a _guest_. Why couldn’t you just mind your own business? I would have let you visit.”

Yeah _right_. He turned and went after Moira, fists ready. She wouldn’t fire. He roared. “You can’t _lock a person_ in an _attic_! He did nothing wrong! It’s. Not. _Right_!” Each word was punctuated by a punch.

Maybe she was dead, many she wasn’t. Mako didn’t bother to check and didn’t particularly _care_ , so he picked Jamison up off the bed and went downstairs. He hadn’t made a sound the whole time, merely watching with those big, yellow eyes. 

Downstairs, Mako set Jamison, still wrapped in his bedding, on the couch before going to find some suitable clothes for him in Moira’s room. They were about the same size.

Her room was an organized mess, much like the rest of her house. She had a few old photographs showing a younger Moira and a fully human Jamison, he guessed. So maybe she wasn’t lying about _that_ , at least. It just made things more fucked up.

He found a few shirts and pants that might fit Jamison, before grabbing his own bag and going to the kitchen to collect the cash.

Mako was in the middle of pulling pants up Jamison (who still watched with those eyes, who didn’t fight or speak and just seemed so _strange_ because of it), when he heard a thump upstairs.

So not dead, then. 

She still had that gun. Mako moved faster, shoving Jamison’s sort-of back foot into a sock and then shoe, and they didn’t fit right or stay on his foot but he wouldn’t be walking anyway, probably, and it was really more for show than anything else - 

The door to the attic steps exploded into tiny wooden chips, revealing an enraged and bloody Moira.

Mako grabbed Jamison and ran.

At the edge of the property, by the fence, Jamison started forming words or something close to them. It was hard to tell with the teeth and not-really snout, but it seemed like he was saying “treehouse”?

Huh. Mako didn’t think that mouth was capable of forming words.

But wait. The _treehouse_.

Mako dumped Jamison and the chains slipped off. Jamison smiled and showed him the nails that Mako had pried out of the window and then absent-mindedly slipped into his bag.

Mako smiled and took the chains.

Moira was at the front door looking out, but Jamison was hidden in shadows by the fence and Mako crept around back. The treehouse’s stilt foundation was rotted through just as Mako thought, still standing only because it always had. 

This would be easier than he hoped.

He wrapped a chain around each stilt, then _pulled_ with all his strength. The front two cracked and Mako got out of the way. Whoever had built it hadn’t thought through the placement well, because it _crumpled_ and fell directly onto the house. Good for Mako, bad for the homeowner.

Unexpectedly, the house caught fire and exploded.

Mako ran, stopping only to pick up Jamison again. As he walked down the street to the bus station, he could hear every guidance counselor and social worker scolding him in his head. How could he just throw his life away like this, there wasn’t any hope of getting back on track _now_ , hadn’t he learned how to control his anger?

But looking down at Jamison, it felt worth it. He didn’t regret a _damn_ thing.

**Author's Note:**

> Here is a good ending point. It could go on to show Jamie recovering from the trauma and becoming more himself as he and Mako travel and get into trouble and avoid getting caught, as they get to know each other and get closer (and maybe romantic), but idk. This is good for now.


End file.
